(no subject)

[the_rck]

::grumbles:: I can’t find my book of baby names. I have two copies, but both of them have vanished. I’ve been digging into the piles of books in the living room and in our bedroom as I have energy, but I have no idea when I’ll find either of them. It’s fairly frustrating. I can get a third copy for about $7, but really, I shouldn’t, and even if I did, it would take until January to arrive, most likely. I want the dratted thing right now.

I do need to go through the piles in the bedroom, but that needs to happen at a point when I’m up to taking the books I’m done with down to the basement to shelve them. Right now, the shelves in the bedroom are overflowing, so getting stuff off of them would be a good thing. Maybe I can find a big box or paper bag or two (we seldom have those, so I’m not holding my breath) to put everything in.

I have also decided that I’m just not going to read all of those issues of Scientific American and Smithsonian that have been accumulating for the last two years. I’m keeping the issues of Discover and Archaeology (I’ve read some of those but don’t know which ones). I’m also recycling some puzzle magazines that I got four or five years ago but never even took out of the bag.

Comments

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Would a baby names website do what you need? I used to like Baby Name Voyager: http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager (Jan found Corbin's name there!). And one of the other baby name websites claimed that by looking at their traffic they could predict the next year's top names fairly accurately. I think maybe it was this one: http://www.babynames.com/

[the_rck]

I'm not sure that either site gives what I'm looking for (I can't really tell with babynamewizard because it seems to want me to register before it lets me see anything). I found one of the copies of my name book, and I haven't seen what it gives anywhere else.

My name, for example, has half a page of text talking about the meaning of the name, instances of the name through history and when and where it was popular, and the etymology of the name. Then it lists variants of the name, divided by language (all European which is a drawback), for fourteen different languages. I find that last bit extraordinarily useful.

Not all names get that much space (I just have a very, very common name), but even those that only get a sentence or two usually have some variants. Corbin has six, for example, and Cordelia has fourteen. Scott has five.

Valerie is a French version of Valeria which comes from Latin (where it derived from a 'gens name' which, as far as I can tell, is like a family or clan name). This book lumps it in with Valentina for reasons that escape me (the text says something about how, in Italian, both names honor St. Valentine.